It’s fascinating to read Nikita Stewart’s write-up on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hiring practices. On an informational level, the article is thorough and enlightening. Mayor de Blasio is creating a very progressive city government filled with people he feels are ideologically aligned with him. He tends to pick the people he wants first and then figures out the job they should do after.
But, on another level, the way this information is presented is one more example of how progressives are portrayed negatively in the Bigfoot media. Take a look:
In Bill de Blasio’s City Hall, it seems more and more, there is only a left wing.
The mayor, who advanced in politics by grass-roots organizing, has built a team filled with former activists — figures more accustomed to picketing administrations or taking potshots from the outside than working from within. His administration is heavily populated with appointees best known for the fights they have fought.
Do you sense the implied criticism? He is only appointing people who agree with him, and these aren’t the kind of people who have any experience in government or management. His administration is filled with professional leftists. The outsiders have infiltrated the realm. Progressives are supposed to be anti-Establishment; “don’t they know their place?”
Watch.
On Friday, Mr. de Blasio appointed Steven Banks, who is the attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society and a longtime critic of city policies affecting low-income residents, as commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration. Mr. Banks recently praised the new mayor for transferring hundreds of children and their families from two homeless shelters cited for violations that made the facilities unfit and unsafe for children.
Mr. Banks has spent his career facing off with city government at public meetings and in the courts. But he is embraced in a de Blasio administration.
Ms. Stewart, who just joined the City Hall desk for the New York Times, appears to think that putting an advocate for homeless children in charge of the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA) is suspect. Let’s take a look at what the HRA does:
HRA serves more than 3 million New Yorkers through essential and diverse programs and services that include: temporary cash assistance, public health insurance, food stamps, home care for seniors and the disabled, child care, adult protective services, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS support services and child support enforcement.
Its 15,000 employees help provide unique individual services that offer sustainable employment along with self-sufficiency plans to overcome barriers to unemployment. HRA’s Employment Services offers job programs and training to help people gain employment. Programs like Back to Work and Business Link allow clients to improve basic skills and English proficiency, and move cash assistance recipients into the working world.
HRA’s commitment to move cash assistance recipients to employment has resulted in the lowest cash assistance caseload in more than 40 years. By providing essential work supports such as food stamps and public health insurance, former cash assistance recipients have a greater ability to stay employed and out of poverty.
Perhaps it is ironic that Mr. Banks is now heading an organization that he previously pilloried for its inefficiencies, but I fail to see how this experienced lawyer and expert on social services is unqualified for the position.
Yet, this idea that progressive activists are supposed to be working against the government rather than serving in the government is a theme in this piece.
Carmen Fariña, his schools chancellor, had quit the Bloomberg administration in protest over its emphasis on standardized test scores. The mayor’s top political strategist, Emma Wolfe, rose from campus activist to organizer for the advocacy group Acorn, the health care union 1199 SEIU and the Working Families Party before helping Mr. de Blasio get elected public advocate in 2009.
His wife’s new chief of staff, Rachel Noerdlinger, was the longtime gatekeeper for the Rev. Al Sharpton. And his new counsel, Maya Wiley, was most recently in the running to lead the N.A.A.C.P.
Ms. Fariña served in the Bloomberg administration, so it is only her ideological opposition to over-testing that merits a mention here, not her managerial skills.
Ms. Wolfe (like me) was a organizer for the dreaded ACORN, a housing advocacy group. You know who else was a community organizer? That big-eared guy in the White House.
Ms. Noerdlinger worked for Al Sharpton? Egads!
At least Ms. Stewart didn’t bring up Tawana Brawley. But she did bring up the N.A.A.C.P., an organization that considered Ms. Wiley for their leadership position, meaning (I infer) that she might have some leadership skills.
Laura Santucci, his chief of staff, is a former acting executive director of the Democratic National Committee and a former political aide at 1199 SEIU. Zachary W. Carter, his corporation counsel, was an appointee of President Bill Clinton as the United States attorney in Brooklyn and led the prosecution of police officers in the beating of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant.
Ms. Santucci was an executive director. Mr. Carter was a U.S. Attorney. But they are mentioned here because of their connections, respectively, to unions and a controversial legal case involving the NYPD. Is there something wrong with unions and prosecuting police brutality?
Maybe we should pine for politicians who cower before the Fraternal Order of Police?
This next bit makes the explicit case that progressives are only supposed to make progress in court or (somehow) in the streets:
In any case, Mr. de Blasio’s mayor’s personnel choices are just one means by which he appears to be easing the mayoralty from the practical details of governing into a platform for the kind of social change usually achieved on the streets and in the courts.
It is a far different approach from that of his predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who favored agency heads and staff members with button-down business backgrounds.
I also want to note that Ms. Stewart has created a false dichotomy in which a mayor must choose between the “practical details of governing” and achieving “social change.” A mayor cannot conceivably do both. And then she enlists former mayoral candidate Mark Green (whose liberal credentials she says are unimpeachable) to stick a knife in de Blasio’s ribs.
“Old habits die very hard,” said Mark Green, a former public advocate and mayoral candidate, and no slouch himself as a liberal. “Giuliani was a prosecutor, Bloomberg was a C.E.O., and so far, Bill’s a political labor activist.”
…Mr. Green, who was Mr. Bloomberg’s opponent in the 2001 election, warned that New Yorkers needed “more of a leader and manager than activist and advocate.”
“He’s been preparing for years to run for mayor but not to be mayor,” Mr. Green said. “The most-asked question I get from earnest citizens is, ‘Can he manage the city?’ ”
That is how Ms. Stewart concludes her piece, but not before taking another shot at progressives.
Last week, Mr. de Blasio turned City Hall’s stately Blue Room, the venue for countless announcements by generations of sober-toned mayors, into the scene of a boisterous rally to celebrate a legal settlement that could decide the fate of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn.
Mr. de Blasio had been arrested during a protest of the hospital’s potential closing. Now he could not resist praising each labor leader and activist who had helped in the fight — including a councilman he called “the best damn cellmate an inmate ever had.”
Over the years, I have written repeatedly about the problems progressives face in getting power because they emerged out of the counterculture and are so suspicious of power institutions. I have said that the goal of progressives should be to take over our institutions and implement our ideas, not to stay on the outside forever throwing rocks. I have argued that we will not be trusted to run organizations like the Pentagon or the NSA if we are perceived to be hostile to those organizations. It’s part getting ourselves to believe in our institutions again and part getting others to see us as the natural leaders of the country again. We can’t do that as anti-establishmentarians. We can’t be the counterculture; we have to be the culture.
What we’re seeing in New York City is the most high-profile effort at this project that we have yet seen, but the way we are treated in the pages of the New York Times shows how far we have to go.
It’s insulting to read this coverage, but it’s part of the price we pay for giving the impression that we’re more interested in being critical than in governing.
Your liberal media!!!!!
Except for the Police Commissioner and his PR person.
you can’t help yourself, can you?
As counter to De Blasio’s campaign promises as the appointment of Victoria Nuland or Timothy Geithner was to President Obama’s.
And not likely to deliver the results that prove that progressive policies are practical.
William Bratton’s record neither speaks toward eliminating stop-and-frisk abuses nor concern for Constitutional rights.
Also, too, for those on Twitter this is her handle: http://twitter.com/kitastew
Just remember to be nice.
Fuck em. Image will be fine because they’ll govern better than neo liberal scum.
Hostility to NSA is desperately needed. In fact NSA should probably be destroyed. Didn’t they just blow the Russia mobilization? And Assad’s hold on Syria? The only thing they’re good at is smashing down internal dissent.
The only thing they’re good at is smashing down internal dissent.
That is what it is designed to do!
I’m totally with you on this Booman, it’s basically everything I’ve been saying for years.
If we as liberal/progressives continue to attach institutions as fundamentally corrupt and all politicians as corrupt how are we going to first of get good people to run for office but then how are we going to get anyone to trust us to govern.
*attack
I think I also missed a word in there somewhere.
Glad I’m not alone, Jim.
And if all extant politician are corrupt? Name me one non-corrupt politician in Chicago.
you know there are plenty, all we hear about though are the scandals
“It’s insulting to read this coverage, but it’s part of the price we pay for giving the impression that we’re more interested in being critical than in governing.”
Is this an image we have embraced or one that is totally and completely thrown on us? Do the Republicans and their tea party brethren have such an image problem? If not, perhaps it has a lot less to do with image of street protests than you’d like to imagine.
well, yeah, the Tea Party has a major image problem. Far more serious, in fact, that progressives’ problem.
but, secondly, I run in progressive circles, and a lot of our problems are self-inflicted. Not all, but a lot.
de Blasio is showing the way forward. For too long, progressives looked to folks like Kucinich who are just temperamentally ill-suited to sell a positive future to the middle class and the poor.
Well sure they have an image problem in nominating complete lunatics. But the radicals who share an ideological affinity with the lunatics but are still respected by the media are treated more seriously than people like de Blasio. And comments are usually terrible on any online article, but in general the NYT has ok comments. These ones are pure “we told you what electing a communist would do”.
For too long, progressives looked to folks like Kucinich who are just temperamentally ill-suited to sell a positive future to the middle class and the poor.
Because people forget Dennis Kucinich’s time as Cleveland’s mayor, for one. Second, when was the last time, before Chokwe Lumumba’s death earlier this week, was there truly a radical mayor? And BdB isn’t really all that radical.
It’s crazy that in America today, ideas like creating jobs for the people, bottom-up, through public works, shared ownership and urban gardens; and creating a system of participatory democracy are “revolutionary” ideas. They should be the norm.
For a long time there’s been such a leadership vacuum in the democratic wing of the Democratic Party that there wasn’t anyone other than Kucinich to support and he was only there because he was willing to step into the vacuum. At least he’s not a corrupt money-grubber or drug or sex addict [those qualities are political career killers only for those to the left of neo-liberals].
Maybe if leftie bloggers spent less time and space promoting or dismissing rightwing Democrats and more time and space on decent, competent, and liberal Democrats, the name recognition of those politicians would improve. Sherrod Brown has been in public office since 1975 and never lost an election. He doesn’t have Elizabeth Warren’s depth on financial institutions, but he has breadth and is a more talented election campaigner than Warren. Why push Warren, who will not run, for POTUS? Because it gives form to what the left stands for. A push for Brown, who won’t run either, would be similarly beneficial. Plow the field for younger solid lefties; the best of whom need to be identified early. Brian Schatz appears to be one.
Not with Republican voters. The crazier the better. And they love Darryl Issa’s obsession with Benghazi.
As if lefties have been office and held power anywhere in the US over the past few generations from which any real public image could be formed. It’s nothing but a false image concocted and promulgated by the rightwing and neo-liberals, duly peddled by their buds in the MSM and in service to their elite masters. Easily so since they’ve had a lock on power.
Indeed. I get booman’s point and even agree with a lot of it. But why continuously choosing the NSA and the Pentagon as examples? If I may say so myself, like MNPundit, I would have no problems destroying the NSA and DHS, and maybe 5 other orgs under that umbrella. We shouldn’t be making a case for why we should run those organizations in our vision; we should be transforming the executive in that vision. And I don’t know about you guys, but that vision doesn’t include the NSA or DHS, and could just as easily see the Pentagon halved tomorrow rather than over a twenty year period.
Regarding NSA, unfortunately we need spies. We need spies whose allegiance is to the country and Constitution. We don’t need spies dedicated to corporate interests. The same goes for both the military and civilian branches of DoD.
The NSA isn’t even the most nefarious of the ~15 orgs in the IC. Which tells you something. In the way the world is structured presently, sure, spies are needed. But the IC is expansive, and many of these orgs could be folded and we’d be fine. Most of the intelligence we need, IMO, is also public knowledge. It’s just the talent and training required to piece together stuff.
I agree 100%. And I suspect as an old Civil Servant, but I don’t know for sure, that an enormous percentage of the activity of those 15 organizations is budgetary battles and one-up-manship with the other 14.
I was just telling someone the other day about a $700+ award I got in the 70’s. Three System Commands were tasked to do a study. I worked for NAVSHIPS (before the merger with NAVORD to form NAVSEA. I did our study myself on overtime. I finished ahead of the deadline and considerably under budget. NAVORD contracted the study out to Vitro Labs who finished late and enormously over budget. NAVELEX farmed the study out to another West Coast field activity who went over budget and never finished. The two star Admiral who headed logistics for NAVSEA was a bitter rival of his counterpart at NAVELEX. The point of the story is not how great I was but the Admiral’s words as he handed me the award and check. “Great job, Tony. You made NAVELEX look really stupid!”
Lol sounds about right. I could definitely see that happening. I keep getting emails to take the survey so our org can “be number one in best places to work at the federal government.” Pretty sure we did finally get number one (low 40’s just 7 years ago) but I’m just like “Who cares?” And as nefarious as some of the head hanchos can get, most of them are just trying to justify their own budgets and existence.
I suspect it was the same in the days of Ramses II.
For what? Over the past sixty years or so, they missed all the major world events that they weren’t directly thwarting or inciting.
Spies had value back in the world of armies secretly gathering to launch an attack on an enemy. That world ended with WWII. Now it’s just a lavish corporate welfare program.
We need effective spies. And I agree about the corporate welfare.
For what? So we don’t get caught flatfooted about events like the Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, et cetera. If we knew what was coming and how far our enemies are willing to go, we could develop more effective strategies. But when our spies are more interested in commercial espionage against our political allies like Germany and South Korea, well who has time for politics in areas without commercial significance.
Might a show of force helped in the Ukraine? Or would it be a disaster? It would have helped tremendously to know Putin’s plans and his contingency plans if US troops showed up. Yap loudly but halt the invasion plans? Or launch Armageddon?
Hmmm
You’re assuming that there would have been events in those countries that were of interest to us and none of those events involved US funding and/or meddling. So, exactly what did that we get for the $5 billion we spent in Ukraine? And we do know that the US played a role in Syria and Libya before armed conflict between factions broke out.
As we’ve had decades of massive funds spent on spy activities — and it hasn’t been good for ordinary people but highly lucrative for a few — I say we stop all these games and see if the results are any worse. (That would include performing legitimate cost benefit analyses.)
I usually agree we you, but no, we can’t put our head in the sand and be isolationist. We did that before after WWI and all it got us was WWII.
Who said anything about being isolationist?
Isolationism, even if it existed which it didn’t, wasn’t what got the US into WWI. It was US mega-bankers that freaked when they realized they’d lent to the parties that were losing.
And to pretend that Nazi Germany got big and powerful without US capitalist support/funding is revisionist history. However, it wasn’t for want of spies that precluded any US assistance for countries being invaded and pummeled by Japan, Germany, and Italy. The actions of those countries weren’t unpopular with a not insignificant portion of the US population including elites.
Isolationism is a myth. This country has never been isolationist, and never will be.
On the other hand, this country has been less imperialistic and more imperialistic, depending on the frame of reference.
This country needs to stop playing empire and engage with the world as a country that just happens to have the most advanced military in the world.
Right now, we tell the world what our interests are, and expect them to conform.
And spies? They’re called satellites and electronic surveillance. The last thing we need is Dulles Brothers-esque paramilitary operations. We’re still fucking dealing with their bullshit shenanigans from the 1950s, ala Iran and Central/South America.
For one thing, our spies aren’t the only spies out there. Some of them are called hackers now, but there are a lot of them out there, and they sure as hell don’t give a damn about your freedom or your privacy.
On that, we need people to trust us to make changes, too. First they have to trust us, period.
A lot of what the New York Times article pushed is the perspective of Liberals from their upper management. Remember these so called journalists are writing for papers that bosses want their ears tickled. They can brag to their associates the motto Liberals/bad, conservatives/good.
Journalism is suppose to be unbiased I know but that died years ago. To keep their jobs most journalists know how to slant their articles to get their upper management attention. Writing to keep one’s job save is the name of the game nowadays.
You have to be elected to govern. You have to be nominated to be elected.
I can name only three Liberals in the US Senate: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Sherrod Brown. Should they not be critical? Or should they just become Obamabots, parroting the party line?
I don’t even know if there are any Liberals in the House. Alan Grayson maybe? Republicans are always calling Nancy Pelosi a Communist or Socialist, but of course she is not.
Who was our last Liberal President? Richard Nixon? Everyone who has been in the oval office since him has been to the right of him.
WRT “Nixon was a liberal compared to today,” lemme second this article from Erik Loomis:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/02/to-noam-chomsky-and-everyone-else-richard-nixon-was-not-
a-liberal
And Jack Reed, Jeff Merkley, Ed Markey, Al Franken, Chris Murphy, Mazie hirono, and Brian Schatz are some others. Significantly more than we have had in a long time.
I forgot Al Franken. I recognize the other names but don’t really know anything about their voting record.
Two. Bernie Sanders voted to keep Gitmo from closing.
It’s curious that many of these same criticisms/image problems plague the NDP (the left-most of the three big parties) on the national level in Canada. They’ll occasionally win provincial elections, with mixed results, but the Conventional Wisdom is that they aren’t capable of really governing, only of being an effective opposition party.
It’s almost like the same playbook is being used in both countries to marginalize progressive voices.
If Jack Layton didn’t die, who knows what might have transpired? Very similar to “what if Nixon was never president?” in the US. Layton was one of the good ones.
They’re acting like DeBlasio just went to ‘ Liberals-R-Us’ and picked folks off the shelf. Every last one of these folks has been in the trenches, doing the hard work – FOR YEARS.
I’d rather people who have been in the trenches, on the ground, fighting for what is right and trying to do right, than Bloomberg’s fucking MBA’s without an ounce of realization of what policy means in the REAL WORLD.
Fuck the NYTimes.
I agree with your overall point, Boo – it’s one of the reasons I’ve been helping underfunded candidates try to win elections out here – with some success. But I think this is more than a tad unfair:
There’s some of that on the left, sure. But who is this “we” you speak of? Progressives aren’t a monolith, and beyond the street activists and “professional critics” who give that impression – often because it’s true – there are literally millions of people who are progressive and do genuinely want to change the institutions from the inside and are serious about it. They give no such impression – it’s created for them.
As for the folks who genuinely are wed to their outsider mindset: do they want to be outsiders, or have they come to the completely rational conclusion that our democratic system is so rigged in favor of big money that meaningful reform from the inside is impossible? Or, at the very least, impossible without a major push from “outsiders” as well? Some would be outsiders and critics regardless, but a lot wouldn’t. And, in fact, even a cursory reading of US history shows that you need both. The only real debates are over: in what proportion, and in what order?
The Tea Party, in this regard, has shown one modern template to using both to effect change. That path used access to a ton of insider money to expand and mobilize outside pressure. Progressives don’t have either the funds or the ideology conducive to that template. But no successful reform strategy can rely on only access or mass numbers.
The fact that media outlets like the Times often make a point of falsely painting progressives as a monolith, negative or otherwise, isn’t progressives’ fault. It’s a lazy media shorthand that in this case serves the NYT’s own agenda nicely. From a different perspective, your statement above does the same thing. It smacks of victim-blaming.
good post, thanks
abogados madrid
I’ve seen a lot of articles about Sawant with you mentioned. Thanks for everything you did.
It seems the corporate influence against the AZ anti gay bill could be a template for us to apply pressure. The Wall St/foreclosure issue is more purple than people realize and the numbers in terms of trillions of dollars goes beyond blue/red ideology. Sen Warren and others are fighting for our American economic system and the middle class that Wall St has tried to destroy.
I came across your site with your post on New Dems and the foreclosure issue back in ’09. If the President and the Dems had approached the issue as progressives and real patriots instead of being worried about image, 2014/2016 would be a slam dunk. Instead, the more the corruption comes out and they fall into the austerity trap the President and Dems will be blamed and can blow it again.
They could have declared property to be theft, called on us to expropriate the expropriators, and put bankers’ heads on pikes, and there would still be three Democratic seats in the Senate up for every two Republican.
When they are through with the Venezuela coup, they can move the players up to New York City.
fascinating article. Picking good people and THEN figuring out where to place them is a method I have some problems with. However, I’ve seen it work in fast growing tech companies. It works if you know what you’re doing.
I thought part of Green’s words contrasted nicely with Stewarts phrasing. “Bloomberg was a C.E.O” To me it made it sound like Stewart was “fighting the last war” and that she had gotten so married to Bloomberg’s style that she could adjust. “Manage, manage, manage.”
If de Blasio can remember the first 3 rules of management he’ll be fine:
should be “that she couldn’t adjust”
I also think you’re on to something important, Booman with your long term thesis. When progressives take the responsibilities of government we have to find our own unique styles for making it happen while implementing progressive policies.
In foreign policy, national security issues for example there has to be more justification of soft power and more marginalizing of the old ways that went overboard with militarism and propping up brutal dictatorships.
well Bloomberg didn’t do much constructive except as far as his own personal fortune, and the fortunes of his set, goes. but that’s what they’re looking for in a mayor anyway, hence the criticism of de Blasio’s team
What does a progressive movement more interested in ‘governing’ look like?
I know you’re not asking for vision, because your response to vision is ‘show me the votes.’ So … what, exactly? Cheerleading the necessary compromises?
Also: nobody’s more suspicious of governing than the right. They overtly hate the government. What they love is power. They understand power. They use power. (These are all often good things! They sound terrible to progressive ears, but I agree that they’re not.)
You’re right that the left is deeply ambivalent about power. When we win, we immediately try to cooperate and compromise.
But that’s not what you’re talking about, is it? The truth is, we’re terrified of progressives who want to seize and wield power. So much so, that I suspect that your definition of ‘governing’ is rather the opposite of ‘wielding power.’
So when rightwing politicians get into office and bring in their own buddies, regardless of competence (think: Michael “heckuva job” Brownie, for starters”) does the NYT run articles like this? Of course not. Because the media is conditioned to think that having GOP run things is their birthright.
Perhaps it is ironic that Mr. Banks is now heading an organization that he previously pilloried for its inefficiencies, but I fail to see how this experienced lawyer and expert on social services is unqualified for the position.
It’s not ironic, it makes perfect sense. He was criticizing HRA for not doing its job. And if he’s spent a lot of time suing them, then he knows a lot about the department and how it works, and he will have some definite ideas about how it should work. Unless he’s just incompetent or a big jerk, I don’t see how he could be better qualified.